We hear all kinds of stories about your flight training journeys. Most of them are great, with a happy outcome and a photo of a beaming you holding a new certificate.
Some of them are appalling: You were handed off to a half-dozen flight instructors, and each one expected to remake you in their image (and none of them cared how much money you had spent). Or, your flight instructor seemed to think that yelling and cursing was the best way to hammer knowledge into you. Or, the airplanes you flew never seemed to make it from one week to the next without needing major down time in the repair shop (and creating major down time in your training progress). Or, your flight school closed its doors two weeks before you were ready to take your checkride, leaving you on your own to pick up the pieces.
That’s why I hope you’ll take a few minutes and complete our fourth annual flight training poll. The feedback we get from you produces the winners of our Flight Training Excellence Awards. We created this poll and use the information it yields to guide student pilots to the best flight schools and instructors in the nation, and to help flight schools develop the type of best practices and customer service that you deserve. You’ll find the poll here. It closes August 22.
In 18 months of primary flight training, I had just two flight instructors. Judging from the anecdotes I hear over and over, I am fortunate to have made it through the process with only two.
The first, Diane Pencil, I chose strictly because I wanted a female instructor. I believed—and I was right—that she would not brush off my concerns about flying small aircraft.
Diane got me to where I was ready to take my presolo test at my Part 141 flight school before she left to take a job with an airline. But she didn’t just tell me goodbye and good luck. She looked over the roster of CFIs at the flight school and turned me over to the one she thought would be a good fit for me.
John Sherman was kind and patient—and, boy, he had to be. As an older student, it took me several tries to get the hang of most maneuvers. (Twenty hours to solo, if you were wondering but too polite to ask.) It didn’t help that I never even realized until after well into the process that I am a visual learner, which means I really need to see things demonstrated rather than explained before I can be expected to demonstrate them in turn. Still, John was never frustrated with me.
Just before I was ready to take my checkride, John got a job with a local aerial surveying company. He didn’t leave me high and dry, however—he stayed on at the flight school as an independent CFI and got me finished up. When I took the checkride and got a notice of disapproval, he saw me through the three hours of remedial training, and he was there to congratulate me when I passed the second attempt.
Aviation is a small community, and although I do not know where Diane is these days, I know exactly where John is. He left the aerial survey business, and he now is chief flight instructor for Delaware State University’s aviation program. I’m glad he’s got an opportunity to influence tomorrow’s professional pilots, and I’m glad to have been able to train with him. I ran into John at the AOPA Homecoming Fly-In on June 6, and told him I was about to take his name in vain for this column (again). He winced. “I’m a better instructor now than I was then,” he said. If that’s true, DSU’s aviation students are getting a good deal.
So please take a few moments to complete our survey and let us know about your flight training experiences—the good and the bad; the excellent and the indifferent. With the help of the Flight Training Excellence Awards, we can guide prospective students to the best of the best. But only you can tell us where they are.
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